April 2021 - Compassion Group Notes
What is suffering? What is Empathy? What is Sacred Service?
Forming a Relationship between Suffering and Empathy
Question: What are Compassion Groups supposed to be about? Answer: Bringing your empathy to your suffering
What happens when you do this? INNER JOY and FREEDOM and PEACE and UNITY - then OUTER SACRED SERVICE
In order to relate to your inner suffering with empathy you have to be able to name, recognize, identify, name and experience your suffering as it is happening. In order to bring empathy to this inner suffering you must be able to name, recognize, identify, name and experience empathy in the moment. What is suffering? What is empathy?
Spend some time this month trying to stream-line the depth of your understanding of these two words. We are discovering that no-one actually seems to know this except in their heads which has become a template overlying the actual experience of either. Empathy is the most constricted and limited experience of Compassion, which is the human expression of Infinite Love. To say you know anything about love, before you can bring empathy to your own suffering is simply an idea - nothing more.
“Nothing I ever do is good enough!”
“Without compassion you will drag yourself reluctantly along on this journey called life. Only with compassion will you dance.”
How old do you feel when you say this? (Nothing I ever do is good enough)
What stage of development does it represent?
What memory are you repeating?
What feeling motivates the statement?
What other feelings are underneath?
What need underlies the statement?
What beliefs do you hold about yourself?
Does this really have to do with anyone else but yourself?
How much would you need to do to be good enough for you to feel “good,” instead of “bad?”in your own eyes?
What have you done your whole life to prove that you are “good enough?”
Stay present to your raging toddler and be a loving parent to the feelings, needs, beliefs, and behaviors that this statement represents. What does this toddler need to hear from you - not others. What beliefs need to be addressed to move to a higher stage of cognitive development?
The Gift of Grace
“Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. it strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. it strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life when we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when year, after year, the longed for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness. If that happens to us, we experience grace. After such an experience, we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed.” ~Paul Tillich
Have any of you ever had this experience? Did it seem to you, to be some external energy or force randomly struck you? Did it happen to you in the depths of suffering? I would be very curious to hear your stories…. email me at johnsonlyndall@gmail.com
The Bridge - What is your responsibility to others?
Our responsibility to ourselves and others is to be loving. One tyranny we were taught that loving means giving up your own life for the life of another who does not want to take responsibility for their own life. This is not loving. It is the opposite. It has it’s genesis in shame and fear and it results in shame and fear. That is not love. This fable by Friedman is one of the most helpful and thought provoking little stories I have ever read to really examine our tendency to foster dependency in others who will not learn to connect to themselves as adults and meet their own needs. It is a story about facing your own need to be “loving,” by using other people who are not loving of themselves. What a horrible transaction - done in awareness.
Think about the symbol off the bridge…
How do we learn to bridge in the world?
What happens internally when there are external deaths, transitions, challenges, crossings?
What emotions and needs surface as you cross from one landscape to another?
Widening Circles of Empathy
Empathy can only grow as you recognize how you judge aspects of your self when they were younger and less evolved and then project that on to others in that same stage of development. This is the ultimate hypocrisy - self-hatred projected on to others. Notice what you judge and find it in yourself with deep understanding and compassion. Study Ken Wilbers stages of human development and lines of human intelligences. You cannot skip stages - NO-ONE - can. So what you see as underdeveloped in others is still operative in you and YOU need to be in relationship to that aspect of yourself with good humor, kindness, understanding, compassion and encouragement with limits. Can your empathy become so infinite that you can hold everything and everyone within it?
https://www.integraldeeplistening.com/understanding-wilbers-developmental-stages/
